• moil •

Meaning: 1. To toil or labor, to work hard, to slave at something. 2. To churn, roil, be agitated, be in turmoil. 3. (British dialects) To wet, dampen, muddy, or soil.

Notes: Today's Good Word comes with a personal noun, moiler, used to refer to laborers or drudges, and not much else. The verb itself may be used as a noun meaning "turmoil, agitation". The same spelling is used for several other nouns with various coincidental meanings, including a kind of apple, a hornless cow, and the glass left on a blowing rod after the article blown has been removed.

In Play: Today's Good Word is probably heard most frequently in the expression moiling and toiling: "After moiling and toiling on the farm all day, Al Falfa enjoyed watching the news while treating himself to an RC Cola and Moon Pie." I personally prefer the sense closer to that of its rhymemate roil: "The visit to her relatives at Christmas left Rhoda Book's mind moiling in ideas for a new novel."

Word History: This word comes from Middle English mollen "to soften by wetting", borrowed and honed from Old French moillier (Modern French mouillier). This French verb descended from Vulgar Latin molliare, a word derived from Classical Latin mollia, used most often in the phrase mollia (panis) "soft part (of bread)". This noun came from mollis "soft", whose root appears in several English words borrowed from Latin, such as mollify and emollient. The root of mollis came to Latin from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) mol-/mel- "soft". The same PIE root made its way through the ancient Germanic languages to English as melt, mellow, and mild. (Now let's thank Nancy Honeychuck for going to the moil of suggesting that we run today's Good Word.)

Mine too. My high school english teacher dismissed him as a low-brow rhymer. But, I think she based her impression on a couple of popular ballads. Consider the wordcraft in this passage about a fatally injured man watching a sunset from "Our Hero"

gwray: A lot of "low-brow" rhymers get dissed by the erudite. Pay them no mind. I enjoy a wide range of poetry. It certainly includes Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelly, Milton, and the other classics. It also includes Service and I am not even ashamed to read Edgar A. Guest and Eugene Field. Actually I quite like them.